John Friedmann Brings Neruda’s Poetry to Writer’s Roundtable

Saturday, April 14, 1-3 p.m., at the Library

John Friedmann will read from his translations of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets, dedicated to Matilde Urrutia, the woman who was the love of his life. Neruda, a citizen of Chile, won the 1971 Nobel Prize. His best-loved poetry is concerned with the beauty and romance of the everyday.

During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people

Friedmann will talk about Neruda’s life and works, and compare his own translations with those of other poets.

John Friedmann divides his time between Orcas Island and Vancouver, B.C. where he is honorary professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Some of his poems have been published in various small collections, but mostly he has written for his own delight. Mostly John writes academic books, of which he has published more than a dozen.

Here is one of the Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by John Friedmann:

You’ll remember that capricious ravine
where the climbing aromas trembled,
and sometimes a bird rose, clothed
in water and slowness: a winter’s coat.

You’ll remember the gifts of the earth:
ill-tempered fragrance, golden loam,
herbs of the bush, crazy roots,
magical thorns like swords.

You’ll remember the flowering bough you found,
bough of shadow and watery silence,
bough like a foam-covered stone.

And that time was like never and always:
we go to where nothing awaits us
and find everything waiting.